Simple Infographics

QlikView has an interesting set of pre-built charts such as bars, lines, pies and scatter diagrams. However, every now and then, it is necessary to give a little twist to these tools in order to satisfy our customers’ hunger for beautiful and useful analytics.

Simple infographics are an easy way to impress a prospect in a demo / SiB event. It is also a good instrument for executive dashboards focused on very visual business users. Yeah, I know… not very useful, but believe me: these things –as simple as they may look– have helped me to sell one or two projects. Even if you don’t have a designer in your company, you can create stuff like this:

Tutorial

In this example I will show you how to create the “Tourism in Paris” chart. As always, you can find the QVW and PNG files here for further reference.

1.- We will use this INLINE table as the data model:

2.- Create a block chart that uses “From” as dimension and “sum(Tourists)” as expression.

3.- We will need a clean chart, so hide the caption, borders and dimensions labels.

4.- Your block chart should look like this:

5.- Create a Text Object that will serve as the “mask” for our infographic (also included in the material).

If you google “whatever_you_are_looking_for icon png” you will find suitable resources. Additionally, you can use a design tool to create the transparencies. If you don’t have any, you can always rely on Paint and PowerPoint:

6.- Adjust the layers of both objects (the mask should be in a higher layer than the block chart).

7.- Put them together and adjust the sizes. (For detailed alignment remember you can use CTRL + Arrows).

8.- Create additional text objects as legends and headers.

To be honest, the most difficult part is finding a good image to use as a mask. Although this is a simple technique, it can really change the look & feel of your dashboards. Just be sure to use it with moderation, nobody likes a dashboard that looks like a Playskool toy.

If this tutorial gave you any ideas of other visual tricks, please share them in the comments area!

14 thoughts on “Simple Infographics”

Nice post Julian! Keep them coming!

At last …. someone focussing on the aesthetics of getting information across to users rather than simply creating boring tables. Great work Julian.

Thanks for sharing this info. We have a tendency to build graphics that are sterile, lifeless, and ugly. What you are sharing challenges us to be more artistic and I think that makes the data easier to digest — and, isn’t that the point. Great job! Keep up the good work.

Thanks for sharing Julian! I hope to incorporate some of these ideas in my work.

Con dos ejemplos sencillos brndas un cambio radical al diseño de aplicaciones. Dicen que una imagen vale más que mil palabras. Gracias por tu aportación